Boarding schools were established for Aboriginal children by the Recollets, a French order in New France as early as the 1620’s. In the 1820’s, Protestant, Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches were running similar schools. In 1920, attendance at residential schools in Canada was made mandatory for all children ages 7 – 15, though many church run schools were already functioning for decades prior. Parents who resisted this policy by keeping their children at home risked imprisonment.

In 1996, Gordon Residential School in Saskatchewan was the last school to close.

Justice Murray Sinclair, chairperson of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when asked what he would say to those that advise people to, “Just get over it. Residential schools were in the past, why don’t you move on?” stated, “It is not over. We are still in the era of residential schools, because of their lingering effects.”

Lasting effects of the traumas suffered in residential schools include suicide, depression, addictions, difficulties in developing positive loving relationships and healthy communities, lack of parenting skills, weakening of culture and language, and lateral violence (Aboriginal people becoming violent with each other).

RELATED RESOURCES

Gord Downie began Secret Path as ten poems incited by the story of Chanie Wenjack, a twelve year-old boy who died fifty years ago on October 22, 1966, in flight from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario, walking home to the family he was taken from over 400 miles away.

Canadian Ecumenical Anti-Racism Network of the Canadian Council of Churches. This resource is intended to help Canadians engage with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and better understand the legacies of colonization that Aboriginal Peoples live with today. Order at the website.

This site is a counterpart to Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools, a touring exhibition that explores the history and legacy of Canada’s Residential School System through Survivor stories, archival photographs, and documents, curated by Iroquois artist Jeff Thomas.